Where The Fork?!? A Mystery

My Easter decor on Friday

 On Saturday, we hosted family Easter.  Saturday just worked better all around for everyone because 1) most of their in-laws were all ready planning a get together on Sunday, 2) Saturday the whole day was open rather than just the after-church part of the day (and church service times varied from household to household), and 3) there was no way, between church and barn cleaning chores, I was going to be able to cook a meal and have guests over to eat and egg hunt between the time I finished cleaning stalls and when it was time to bring horses in for the evening feed.  In addition to DH and my descendants, we also had my parents and my brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew (my brother's family we'd been unable to get together with since 2022).

So Saturday it was.  And it was a beautiful day!  No rain, just a little wind, and temperatures that got close to 60 degrees.  The sun kinda shone, the grass was green (and not yet so tall and thick that DH would have needed to cut it), the daffodils were in full bloom, everyone arrived on time, the kids (all ten of them) were well behaved.  

We egg hunted.

We ate really good food; so good that nobody even bothered to take a picture of the spread, because we were all so eager to dig in.  Highlights included a cheese 'ball' shaped like a carrot with shredded cheddar cheese on the outside of it and a chunk broccoli on the end for the carrot greenery, a mixed green salad with about 20 different add-in options, corn casserole, ham and more ham (with 23 people I had made over 20 pounds of ham), banana cream pie, finger Jello (that actually went faster than the pie!), two dozen deviled eggs. . .

It was a really (loud and somewhat chaotic but overall) good day.  Tiring, but good.  I have to confess that by the time everyone left, and I looked at all the dirty dishes piled up from the event (my dishwasher sorta died a few weeks ago), I said "I'll deal with that tomorrow."  Because on Sunday, other than church and barn chores, there was nothing on my docket. No company to host, nobody else's house to travel to, just a quiet afternoon.

My Easter decor on Sunday morning.

So, it wasn't until later in the day on Sunday that I tackled the final clean up from our Saturday gala.  With DH's help (him drying and putting away), we got the dishes done.  And since DH had done the putting away, for the most part, I didn't notice until Sunday evening that we had a mystery on our hands.

We had used 'real' plates and silverware as opposed to paper plates and plastic silverware.  To do so, despite the current status of our dishwasher, had been a conscious decision on DH and my parts.  We just hate the concept of buying stuff to throw it away after use, and all the extra trash that creates (that goes in a landfill to sit and sit and sit).  And so we had gotten, in the past year, an extra set of silverware and purchased 20 plastic divided trays (plates).

New plates for group meals.

We had already been the owners of 7 similar plastic plates (dubbed the 'potluck plates' by my kids when they were little as we always used those when going to potlucks where participants were requested to bring their own tableware in addition to a dish to pass) for decades.  The originals had come from the senior meal center that Mother-in-Law worked at before her retirement, and had been phased out from that institution when it switched to disposables.  

The originals, left, and the new on the right.

Anyway, all that to give a little background to the current mystery.  When I was sorting the extra plates and silverware from what we use every day, I noticed that we are missing 7 little forks.  (The size most people refer to as dessert forks; they are the ones we typically give small kids to eat with and refer to a little forks rather than the 'big' forks--regular size forks--adults use).  Now, I know how many forks I own; especially after making it a point, in the last year, to reach a number that would be enough to have 20 or more people eat at once.  And I know which forks are the new 'extras' and which ones I've owned for over 30 years.  And, I'll have to admit, I'm rather attached to the things I've owned for pretty much the entirety of my adult life.

So to have SEVEN forks missing, and all of them be the forks that have served me and my family for over three decades, well, it's a big deal to me.  I counted.  I re-counted.  I looked in every drawer in my kitchen in case someone saw them, unused, on the counter after the dessert was served (at which time I was in the barn doing horses' evening feed) and, thinking they would be helpful, put them away somewhere (obviously not in the correct spot).  I searched and re-searched the counters all around the sink area in case somehow I had missed a bunch of dirty forks during the dishwashing marathon.  I even (ICK!!) dug through the very full bag of trash from Saturday in case a kid or kids had accidentally thrown them away with the paper plates that someone pulled from the cupboard to serve dessert on while I was busy in the barn.

Did I find them?  Nope.  Not a single one!  How do seven forks go missing?!?  It's a mystery.

All I can think of, at this point, is that they were in one of the dishes/casserole pans brought by guests and, unseen, got taken home with someone's dirty dish-to-pass dish.  But you'd think by now, on Tuesday, that they would have been discovered (assuming everyone has washed their Saturday dish by now) and I would have gotten a text saying "Hey, weird thing, I have some of your forks.  They got mixed up with my stuff and brought home by mistake."